Tomorrow, the House Judiciary Committee meets for a hearing that will discuss the KIDS Act, a DREAM Act-lite proposal that some Republicans are considering taking up instead of immigration reform for the 11 million. As Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA) recently said, “We’ve been there, we’ve done that, that’s so yesterday....
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In a new piece posted at The Atlantic’s website, Republican strategist and former House leadership aide John Feehery tells political reporter Molly Ball that Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) “ought to ditch the Hastert rule.” As the article details: Feehery actually wrote the speech in which Hastert...
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On the Sunday shows, Boehner’s Lack of Leadership Leaves Steve King As the Defining Voice of the Caucus Judging by this weekend’s Sunday shows, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) is now “the man” when it comes to House Republicans stating a clear position on immigration policy. On the popular Sunday...
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In the fight for immigration reform, two of the political incentives for House Republicans to vote for a bill involve constituent breakdown: how “purple” their district is politically, and how Latino it is demographically. That’s what the scatterplot below shows, for many (not all) of the House Republicans who...
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Jul 11, 2013
Steve King “Hell No” Caucus Small and Embattled; A Group in the Middle that is Likely to “Vote No, but Pray Yes”; and an Unknown Number of Reformers Depending on which article you read about the House Republican immigration meeting yesterday, you come away with a different take on...
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Jul 10, 2013
As immigration reform advocates, we’re used to the pessimism of “conventional wisdom” and we’re used to conventional wisdom being wrong. Rahm Emanuel once said that immigration reform was the “third rail of American politics,” yet the illegal immigration wedge strategy was a bust in every recent election. Tom Tancredo...
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Last Sunday, David Brooks of the New York Times had this to say on NBC’s Meet the Press: I’ve seen a lot of intellectually weak cases in this town. I’ve rarely seen as intellectually a weak case as the case against the Senate immigration bill. The Republicans say they...
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Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID), formerly of the House Group of 8 on immigration, got into a widely-covered spat with conservative columnist David Brooks this weekend, when Brooks called the Congressman out for opposing the Senate immigration bill. Labrador, who this weekend also spent time warning Republicans about the perils of...
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House GOP Out of Excuses on Immigration Reform This weekend, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) again voiced his opposition to “a special pathway to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants, noting that he would not push legislation in which “people who are here unlawfully get something that people who have worked...
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With immigration reform having passed the Senate with a strong bipartisan vote, attention is now focused on the House of Representatives. Pundits are immediately jumping to the question, “how will immigration reform pass the House?” However, an equally important question is “what happens if the House blocks immigration reform?”...
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